Date of Award

6-2022

Document Type

Union College Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Caroline Abraham

Keywords

Robinhood, Reddit, Stocks, Due Diligence, Retail Investors

Abstract

As our society evolves, social media continues to have a prevalent impact on individual investors as they seek expert advice through various social media platforms to get information and tips. Robinhood accounts for nearly 50% of the market share of retail investors and has more than $80 billion in assets under management. The WallStreetBets (WSB) subreddit is theoretically a bank of information providing valuable resources for retail investors to gain insight on. Over the last couple years, it has seen rapid growth in its community generating a following of more than 10 million people. Research on the effect of WSB on Robinhood stock ownership is a novel area of research. Using panel data from Robintrack.net from 2019 and due diligence (DD) reports from WSB during 2019, this paper investigates the effect that due diligence reports had on the change in ownership for Robinhood users. I hypothesized that buy recommendations would lead to an increase in the number of users in possession of the stock on Robinhood, while a sell recommendation DD report would lead to a decrease in the number of users holding that stock. Ultimately, this paper discovers buy recommendation DD reports led to a 1.1% decrease in the number of owners compared to sell recommendation DD reports. With future research and more control variables and market trend data, more significant correlations could be made between WSB and Robinhood to better understand the effect social media is having on retail investors on the platform.

Download
Off-Campus Download

Share

COinS
 

Rights Statement

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted.